Report From Doodyville

Memories of the Howdy-Doody Show

When I was a small kid (we're talking chronologically here—not emotionally, which is a whole other story), I watched—along with millions of other little Fifties kids—a children's TV show called The Howdy-Doody Show. I don't remember if it aired daily or just came on each Saturday morning, but Saturday in the mid-am is when I saw it.

The show featured a sort of emcee and resident grown-up named Buffalo Bob Smith, various puppets/marionettes, and sundry live characters, but the star of the show was a marionette named Howdy-Doody. The name, "Howdy-Doody" was derived from “Howdy-Do!”—as in “How-do-you-do,” spoken in good-old fashioned cowboy patois, or somebody’s conception of what that might have been.

Howdy wore western garb, like his father/creator Buffalo Bob Smith, and spoke in a sort of child-adolescent golly-gee-whiz voice. He had a lot of freckles and was obviously intended to be an all-American boy from the heartland, like Alfalfa from the Our Gang comedies or maybe Mickey Rooney from the Andy Hardy movies...
Doody was a regular Candide, an eternal innocent who— although repeatedly encountering the confusing, sometimes unjust, and occasionally threatening world of adults—always emerged unspoiled, with his good old-fashioned boyish American innocence intact.

The first confession:
I tried to like Howdy, but the truth was—he gave me the creeps. It wasn’t just the natural feeling of sur-reality and hovering psychosis that enters your brain when you see a marionette spasmodically jerking around, opening and closing that strange, hinged mouth, and talking in someone else’s voice.
It was also Howdy’s aggressive all-American and exaggerated facial characteristics always induced (I can only speak for myself here) a feeling of cognitive dissonance. He had too many freckles, his eyes (being marionette’s eyes) never changed expression, no matter how gee-whizzy he got, and his nose was bit too long for my comfort. It reminded of Pinnochio’s nose when he was lying. So I could never absolutely trust (let alone like) Howdy, no matter how much my kid heart wanted to.

The second confession:
There’s a lot to talk about when remembering this show; not the least of which was my terrible childish crush on a little (not so little when you’re a small kid) marionette called Princess-Summer-Fall-Winter Spring—an attractive Hollywoodish version of an "Indian Maiden"). And, wait—it just occurred to me! There might be some mystical, perhaps Jungian, connection between the word HollyWood and the fact that my first TV love was made out of wood! (if you have any insight into this, please let me know).

Well, no matter— The fact was that I had unidentifiable, troubling mini-urges when I looked at her—and had often to remind myself (in the service of preserving my own innocence) that the Princess, in her sexy buckskin-fringed outfit, was just a piece of wood hanging from some strings. At some later point in the show’s evolution, Princess SFWS turned into a real girl, but back when I first started watching she was made out of wood; which was just as well, because, let’s face it, there’s a limit to the amount of lust a piece of wood arouse in a seven-year old.

There are many Doodyish things to talk about, but, for now, let’s focus on the particular images and thoughts that popped into my head this morning when I woke up; my consciousness located, as usual, somewhere in my murky childhood...
Most particularly, and for some reason I can’t identify (and for the first time in more than seventy years) one specific image popped into my mind—one of the regular marionette characters on the show: Phineas T. Bluster. Mr. Bluster was your classic, crotchety old guy, probably with a mustache or scraggly beard, and/or some other disgusting old person's bodily effusion—like hairs growing out of his ears and uncontrollable eyebrows.

Like millions of other children, I feared and hated Mr. Bluster. He was routinely jeered at—(well, at least he received some polite childish booing from the kids in the "Peanut Gallery". The Peanut Gallery was a sort of Greek chorus of children who were selected out of thousands of applicants to be on the show each week. They cheered whenever Howdy had some small triumph and laughed when some puppet or human character did or said something funny.
The Peanut Gallery generally served as reactive human puppets for whatever moral point Buffalo Bob Smith was making or whatever product he was pushing; usually the product was some revolting excrescence—created by the sadists at Kraft Foods who sponsored the show—a food item such as a hot dog covered with melted American cheese dripping off the sides of the bun. I had to suppress extreme nausea when these commercials came on. (I grew up in a kosher Jewish household where dairy and meat were never mixed).

Buffalo Bob opened each show by asking in a loud, game-show host voice, "What time is it, kids?" And the Peanut Gallery would shout, in perfect unison, "It's Howdy-Doody Time!!" Like most American kids I desperately wanted to be a member of the Peanut Gallery, but—I can’t help this from popping up—I was sure that I looked too Jewish to make the grade. So, at the same time (was this just sour grapes?) I wanted to be one of them—one of the in-crowd—I also considered the Pea-nutters to be a bunch of trained-seal, conforming idiots. (Ambivalence! Ambivalence! Ambivalence! How long will this character trait torment me?)

The third confession:
Let’s get back to back to Mr. Bluster… He was, I remember now, also the mayor of Doodyville; but maybe because I was too small to know or care what a mayor was, this fact didn’t interest me. It was only later, when I emerged into the Sixties—and became a committed leftist—that his Mayoralty bothered me at all—and, at that point, I never thought about Dootyville, other issues occupying my mind.
BUT-when I was a child in the early Fifties, Mr. Bluster, whatever his official title may have been, served primarily as the living symbol of every child’s worst experience with a nasty old person who lived in their neighborhood and hated kids. He was Scrooge, Mr. Potter and The Wicked Witch of the West rolled into one scary, noxious package.

But now that I am doing the mortal-coil shuffle, I feel compelled to say something… Only now, in the present moment, more than seventy long years after the fact (and having become a crotchety old man myself)—Only now do I truly understand and sympathize with Mr. Bluster. Really, what do little kids, with their narcissistic whining and their annoying jumping and running all over the place, know of the trials of old age; what do they know of loss of motor function and looming mortality, of rheumatoid arthritis and persistent GERD?
(How can an old person not be in a bad mood!)

So, anyway, if you’re reading this, Mr. Bluster (perhaps you’re a subscriber to Substack), I want to say this: “I deeply regret having booed and jeered you when were made to look a fool on Doody’s show. I want you to know that—although it's far too late to prevent the suffering you endured from the slings and arrows launched at you by the morons, marionettes and the children of Doodyville— I want you to know that I understand you, I sympathize you’re your sufferings and I respect you as a human being (even though you were puppet). You are not alone, Phineas! I know that soon the lord will call me, too—and I look forward to the time when you and I will be able to laugh at the mistakes and foolishness of those bygone days..."

The last confession:
One final, Doodyish thought—and one that it is only possible for me to talk about because of the Herculean efforts of all the therapists in life… I could never watch Howdy Doody without having to struggle with the fact (much as I tried to suppress it) that "Doody" (Dooty) was—back in the day—a euphemism for poop—which was a euphemism for shit; that's how my mother, aunts, grandmother and various of the other female authority figures in my life (there were no others) referred to "it".

So pity me! While I tried to participate in the trials and triumphs of Doodyville and its just-plain-folks, I had to deal with this disgusting obsession at the same time. Sometimes in the throes of my already nascent insanity, I had a recurring vision that Howdy-Doody himself was made of shit, and one day his freckles and strings and inane smile would fall way and he would be revealed as his true, horrible, steaming self...
*I know, I didn’t need to add that last part, but I did. I think I feel better now—even if you don’t.